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Twins City

Scott Turow’s ‘Identical’

It is always a pleasure to visit Kindle County, Scott Turow’s shadow version of greater Chicago, which he has been building and populating since he all but created the modern legal thriller in 1987 with “Presumed Innocent.” One of the many satisfactions of the string of assured and gripping novels since then has been returning to the county’s courtrooms and barrooms, catching glimpses of characters who were central to earlier works and hearing echoes of the compromises that marked them.

But not every trip to Kindle County is equally rewarding. This latest one, “Identical,” is stuffed with so many themes and reversals that readers may end up feeling the way you do after a long family meal with too much talk and food: disoriented, logy and a little nostalgic. Turow has many gifts. He might consider being a little more parsimonious in doling them out.

Yes, he wants to stretch, and who can blame him? He long ago proved that he is a fine stylist whose sly, grave sentences are merciless tools for probing a criminal justice system unequal to the task of sorting out responsibility for human frailty. So he has set himself new challenges, touching on areas of the law where he is less sure-footed and working with a classical template apparently meant to give his tale literary weight. The stew gets awfully rich.

The novel takes its inspiration from the myth of Castor and Pollux, the twin brothers born to Leda after she was raped by Zeus. “For those familiar with the myth,” Turow explains in an afterword, “the parallels between it and my story should be plain, as is the fact that I did not allow the old tale to be any more than a fabric on which I did my own embroidery.”

Still, that embroidery can be distracting. There are frequent references to twins in mythology, Shakespeare and the Bible, in what seems an attempt to give more heft to a perfectly good thriller, though one that takes a little time getting airborne.

It starts with an italicized flashback to a lawn party on Labor Day weekend in 1982, and the passage is as dense as a standardized reading-comprehension test. Turow introduces us to many of the main characters, most of whom bear the names of Greek gods or variations on them. The patriarch hosting the party is Zeus Kronon; his daughter is Dita, short for Aphrodite. Among the guests are her boyfriend, Cass Gianis; his identical twin, Paul; and their mother, Lidia. The day ends in Dita’s murder.

The scenes set in the book’s present, in 2008, are altogether more inviting. They start with a parole hearing, with a man’s liberty at stake, in a low-ceilinged room with folding chairs and card tables. “The power of the state, frequently spoken about as if it were a dread disease, was often most notable for the utter lack of majesty with which it was exercised,” Turow writes.

Paul is now running for mayor, and the plot is set in motion when the dead woman’s brother accuses Paul of a role in the murder. Raymond Horgan, whom we met as Kindle County’s chief prosecutor in “Presumed Innocent,” is the campaign’s lawyer, and he has views about campaign finance law.

“He’s an individual exercising his First Amendment rights,” Horgan says of the brother, Hal Kronon, who is preparing to take out ads restating his accusation. “At least as long as there are five clowns on the Supreme Court who think that spending money is a form of unrestricted free speech.”

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Sébastien Thibault

“An old fellow in a flannel shirt” at a town-hall meeting seems to set out Turow’s own views on this state of affairs: “If rich people could spend without limit trying to decide elections, we were basically back to where we started, when the only voters were white men with property.” Paul responds to Kronon with a defamation suit of the sort that Oscar Wilde and Alger Hiss came to rue.

But the suit is implausible. Politicians in the United States almost never sue for slander or libel, partly because American law puts public figures to the nearly insurmountable burden of proving not only that the statements they object to are false but also that they were made with knowledge of that falsity or with serious doubts about their truth. Here they were made by a murder victim’s brother and were plainly earnest, whether true or not.

Filing a defamation suit also subjects plaintiffs to intrusive questioning and investigation. No sensible politician, and certainly not one harboring secrets, would risk such a thing.

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But this candidate’s advisers prefer the courtroom to the television set, reasoning that “elections are about myths, about making them think you’re a god, not a mortal.” Such random references to mythology run through the book, and they can be heavy-handed. I’m pretty sure, moreover, that there was more smiting than suing on Mount Olympus.

Paul, a former prosecutor and successful plaintiffs’ lawyer, should know better, and he does. “I’ve been in enough courtrooms to know once you file, you lose all control,” he says. “I should have laughed it off and called Hal a right-wing goof.” This sensible reflection makes his decision to sue all the more unconvincing.

Still, the rich, sharp courtroom scenes, always Turow’s specialty, are the best parts of the book. He is particularly good at showing how judges use minor rulings to nudge a case to their preferred outcome.

Elsewhere, the narrative bounces among several characters’ perspectives, which gives it a jumpy and inconsistent quality, one heightened by questions about the twins’ identities. When it settles on Paul, though, there are nice ­moments: “You chose this life,” he thinks, “you walked a tightrope with only gumption and a parasol, the chasm chanting its siren song below. But there was no point in daring when the only outcome was bad.”

The book’s momentum relies on two characters largely unencumbered by myth. One is Evon Miller, a former F.B.I. agent in a volatile lesbian relationship. She is well drawn, but the star of the book is Tim Brodie, an 81-year-old private investigator and one of Turow’s most appealing creations. Brodie is beset by age and regrets, and he speaks in cadences reminiscent of Elmore Leonard. “I’m suspicioning it’s probably true,” he says of one theory. He wonders of an older woman “what illusions made her put on stretch pants.”

The novel grows more lurid and pulpy as it proceeds, with enough running around and twists to make a soap opera writer blush. These are followed by yards of expository dialogue that clears up most but not quite all of the confusion that preceded it. Soliloquies are uttered by characters whose sudden urge to confess is not wholly explained.

“Identical” has many parts and moods. It has treats and shortcomings, like a trip to a city with a lot of different neighborhoods. One might wish “Identical” more streamlined, but that would not do justice to the bustling landscape that is Kindle County.

IDENTICAL

By Scott Turow

371 pp. Grand Central Publishing. $28.

Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court for The Times.

A version of this review appears in print on October 20, 2013, on Page BR10 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Twins City. Today's Paper|Subscribe